Party of One (57 page)

During the Second World War, Harris was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Fifth Reserve Armoured Regiment of the Princess Louise’s Hussars, drilling militia recruits in the summer. His son Joseph, the prime minister’s father, was only eleven when the Second World War broke out, but he became an army cadet during high school. He loved Canadian military history, and had
a keen interest in military insignia, which he collected. He wrote two books about regimental flags and badges. Joseph Harper, who died in 2003, became a consultant to the Department of National Defence (DND).

Stephen Harper’s office houses a military uniform encased in glass. The prime minister followed the family tradition of an interest in military insignia and badges, which he indulged with a real army. But that didn’t stop Harper from violating military protocol when he was shown wearing a Canadian Forces flight jacket complete with pilot wings while flying in a military plane to survey flood damage in Alberta. Troops do not approve of civilians wearing military gear, even if that civilian is the prime minister.
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The footage of Harper reminded some people of George W. Bush flying over New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

On July 19, 2012, the Canadian Forces were given pins to wear commemorating the War of 1812. The pin has a red maple leaf with two crossed swords on a blue background. Harper authorized members of the Canadian Forces to wear the pin on their uniforms for three years. Military units will also fly a similar commemorative banner. The then defence minister, Peter MacKay, made the sales pitch: “This tribute will be a daily reminder of a key chapter in Canada’s history, and of the courageous efforts made by the regular and militia soldiers, provincial marine
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and the aboriginal allies who helped define who we are today.”

Despite a concerted effort to popularize a two-hundred-year-old war, which involved Harper’s personal participation in some of the promotional events, Canadians did not respond as expected to the government’s campaign. The public relations campaign—which included a new national monument, historical re-enactments, museum exhibits, a special silver dollar that sold for $60, and even a mobile-phone app—did not elicit much public support. Instead, a lot of people were upset that the government
was spending $28 million on the War of 1812 while slashing spending on Library and Archives Canada by $9.6 million. But the deepest reason for public apathy toward the attempt by the government to whip up nostalgia for an antique war was that veterans returning from Afghanistan felt they had been betrayed by the Harper government.

The war in Afghanistan drew Canada’s biggest military deployment since the Korean War. Forty thousand Canadians served during the twelve-year mission, mostly in the deadliest combat zone around Kandahar. From the arrival of Canadian special forces in December 2001 to the final withdrawal of troops in early 2014, 162 Canadians and 40 Americans under Canadian command were killed in Afghanistan. Thousands of others suffered debilitating, life-changing wounds, both physical and psychological. Of the 2,179 wounded Canadian soldiers, an estimated 637 are suffering from non-battle injuries; the remaining 1,542 were wounded in action.

Unlike previous wars the nation’s military has been involved in, Canadians were deeply divided by the moral dilemma presented by the Afghanistan mission. On the one hand, no one was against the goal of building schools, educating girls, and assisting Afghans to break the fundamentalist grip of the Taliban. But on the other hand, not much proof existed that these actions were actually taking place. The news was full of far less noble accomplishments: midnight raids on ordinary people’s homes, lawless detentions, and the killing of innocent people by bombs not quite as smart as their inventors believed. Indeed, persistent stories conveyed that the national honour was being besmirched by the alleged practice of handing over Afghan detainees to national authorities, who in turn tortured or abused them. According to the Geneva Convention, that is a war crime. Many of those stories came from a Canadian diplomat, Richard Colvin.

Colvin had been with Foreign Affairs since 1994, with postings to Sri Lanka, Russia, and the Palestinian territories. He travelled on a bloody ticket to Afghanistan. Colvin was the replacement for diplomat Glyn Berry, the brave civilian on Canada’s Provincial Reconstruction Team who was killed by a car bomb on January 15, 2006, at the height of the insurgency around Kandahar. What Colvin, a native of the UK, liked most about his adopted country was Canada’s deeply held value of tolerance. He admired the Canadian virtues of acceptance, fairness, and social protection for the unfortunate. As he put it to me, “Canada believed in human rights and stood for something, unlike the UK, which suffered from its Imperial past. Canada’s instinct in those days was to be a helpful fixer, a peace-keeper.
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Canada was a middle power committed to bilateralism and playing a useful role.”

Colvin said that when he took up his new post, the International Red Cross immediately wanted to know what was happening to Afghans taken prisoner by Canadian Forces. The diplomat was surprised to learn that Canadian commanders were not notifying the humanitarian agency in time to allow for visits to check on the health and identity of detainees. At first, Colvin thought the Red Cross was exaggerating, because Canada had always been known as a humanitarian country that took its obligation to uphold international law seriously. Although he received a litany of complaints in the weeks after his arrival, Colvin held off on reporting back to Ottawa because he simply didn’t think that what the Red Cross was saying could be true.
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Instead, he met three times with the Red Cross and with senior military personnel who had a policy of not talking to the humanitarian agency. He learned that NATO was also complaining about Canadian Forces not advising the organization of detainee transfers. “They were really focused. We, by comparison, did not seem to care,” he told me. Colvin eventually forwarded prisoner
abuse reports to the Canadian government through C-5, a classified communications system, hoping to raise an alarm in official Ottawa. “I needed to get it right. There was no one else.” Despite Afghanistan being the foreign policy priority of the Harper government, only two Canadian diplomats were on the ground—just Colvin and one other person. Colvin had to look to CSIS for intelligence on the situation in theatre because the military viewed civilian authorities like him as the enemy.

To his surprise, instead of earning the government’s appreciation for alerting it about the detainee situation, Colvin was reprimanded. He was informed that his report had created “anxiety” in the department of justice and among the generals. Colvin told me, “I don’t consider myself a whistle-blower. I suppose I became one.” The Harper government simply didn’t want to talk about it. It fought public hearings tooth and nail, arguing that they could damage the reputation of senior officers involved and risk revealing military secrets. But Colvin finally gave his testimony in front of a special parliamentary committee looking into the detainee issue, and was forcefully and publicly attacked by defence minister Peter MacKay. Looking back on it, Colvin told me, “It was dirty to slag me personally. MacKay did that aggressively. I knew there would be a big fight and they would try to destroy me. They were obliged to do something. The fighting started the day after I testified.”

The Harper government’s secrecy about everything to do with the Afghanistan mission was staggering. It was perhaps the most damaging single issue the government faced. Emotions were running so high that the Tories prorogued Parliament for two months in early 2010, and faced a contempt ruling. To this day, the records dealing with Afghanistan remain heavily censored, and cabinet papers and legal opinions are excluded from those documents that are released. But according to Colvin, because of him, “The message had finally gotten out.”

The Harper government vehemently denied Colvin’s testimony, insisting that Canada did not approve of torture and had not participated in it. It was a defence that rang hollow after a secret order given by defence minister MacKay became public. On April 13, 2014, Jim Bronskill of the Canadian Press reported that the Harper government had secretly ordered the Canadian military to share information with allies even when there was a “substantial risk” it could lead to torture. CP obtained a copy of the November 2011 memo under the Access to Information Act. A basic tenet of Canada’s identity—upholding international law that forbade such transfers—was changed without ordinary citizens being the wiser. The newly released memo was expressly prepared for MacKay by DND officials, the fifth federal agency to apply the Harper government’s instruction to exchange information with a foreign agency, even if there was a “substantial risk” of torture. (The other agencies were CSIS, the RCMP, the Canadian Border Services and Communications Security Establishment Canada.)
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Meanwhile, the government tried to say that Canadian forces and companies were succeeding in modernizing Afghanistan by building infrastructure projects such as schools and roads and by defeating the Taliban. It was third-rate propaganda, and many of the schools Canada had built were crumbling. When the clerk of the Privy Council showed up for a visit to Afghanistan in 2006, Richard Colvin found him uninterested in the true progress of the war but insistent on one thing: “All he wanted was to set up a televised connection between children in rural Afghanistan and Canadian kids.” A good-news public-relations event couldn’t have been further from the facts on the ground.

The $50-million reconstruction of the Dahla Dam on the Arghandab River 34 kilometres northeast of Kandahar has been a massive failure mired in corruption. It was to have been Canada’s signature project. The reservoir was to feed 40 kilometres of
irrigation ditches to bring water to farmland. Despite the project, won by the scandal-ridden firm SNC-Lavalin, Kandahar still has its water crisis. Further, violence marred voting in April 2014, and not much has improved for ordinary people.
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The current government is widely viewed as corrupt. According to US intelligence estimates, when US troops are drawn down and leave the country, Afghanistan will return to chaos by as soon as 2017. It has left the bitterest of memories of the war for Richard Colvin: “People died for nothing, to prop up drug dealers and killers.”

The government has been evasive about the true progress of the war, about possible violations of international law by Canadian personnel, and even about how much the mission cost. The most conservative estimate is $12 billion, including $8.4 billion on the combat mission alone. As of 2008, the Parliamentary Budget Office put the actual cost at $18 billion. The “all-in costs” up to 2014, when the Canadian troops came home, have been estimated at $28 billion, a number that can’t be verified because of the lack of transparency at the DND. These estimates do not include costs for the future care of returning soldiers who were left with physical or mental injuries.

Until the troops started coming home from Afghanistan, the relationship between the military and the Harper government had been good. Three things changed that. First, the government was determined to balance the budget through deep spending cuts, $13.6 billion by 2017. In a unanimous vote in the House of Commons, the government benches refused to exempt the Department of Veterans Affairs from the new austerity.

Second, the New Veterans Charter (NVC) was fatally flawed. It was adopted without amendment or debate, as a result of a unanimous motion in the House of Commons to prevent the bill from dying on the order paper in the final days of the Paul Martin government. The aim of NVC was well intentioned: to
focus on wellness and productivity rather than illness and dependence. It was originally intended to be a long-term, cost-neutral way of caring for veterans, but it was anything but that. Under the charter’s terms, wounded soldiers who had once been eligible for lifelong pensions were now given a one-time lump-sum payment. Adopted in 2006, the NVC has proven very unpopular—being met by court challenges, two reviews in 2009 and 2011, and a current parliamentary review.

Third, health services provided by the military to men and women wounded in body and mind have been woefully inadequate. The troops had been handed an impossible mission and now they were paying the price. As retired major-general Lewis MacKenzie told me, “The impossibility in Afghanistan was partly the unrealistic expectation . . . to peace-keep, do humanitarian work, and make war—all at once.” The mutually exclusive missions took a terrible toll. More than two thousand members of the Canadian Armed Forces came back wounded from Afghanistan. Many suffered alone because of the continuing stigma attached to admitting to any form of mental distress. The most common operational stress injuries are post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. PTSD’s symptoms include unrelieved edginess, insomnia, anxiety, and irritability. The symptoms can take months to emerge and may never disappear. There is no drug for treating PTSD. Without proper and timely care, the emotional demons begin to take their toll, just as the IEDs, bullets, and unspeakable sights did to the soldiers during their active duty in Afghanistan. Victims of PTSD often try to anaesthetize themselves with alcohol or drugs. Many isolate themselves from those around them. An alarming number commit suicide. Homelessness is a growing problem for those who suffer mental health issues attributed to their time in the military. Adjusting to civilian life is hard. “Being able to shoot someone at 600 metres is not necessarily in high demand by civilian
companies,” says Captain Victoria Ryan. A former corporal who served under her was found frozen to death on an Ottawa street in February 2013. It broke her heart, and Ryan has launched a volunteer organization to find help for homeless veterans.
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Roméo Dallaire, a former general, has been a strong advocate for soldiers with PTSD. In May 2014, he announced his retirement from the Senate to spend more time crusading for veterans’ rights and on PTSD research.
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Dallaire’s answer to this massive problem is to allow Canada’s two thousand wounded or injured soldiers to continue to serve in the military, despite a diagnosis of PTSD. (There are about sixty-eight thousand full-time soldiers in the Canadian Armed Forces.) As reported by CP, Dallaire gave an explosive interview shortly before testifying on April 3, 2014, before the House of Commons Veterans Committee, which is reviewing the New Veterans Charter. Despite the Conservative messaging that it supports veterans, Dallaire described a number of recent encounters with “politicians who are second-guessing the cost of veterans. . . . This has been sniffing its way around the Conservative hallways and it’s pissing me off.” Dallaire called for a legislated social covenant with soldiers to ensure that the wounded are properly looked after.